right now im not active, i need to move to a different place first, before i can keep snakes, but then i will try to breed.


the thing is, back when i was a child, i had a nice aquarium. and over the years, you buy pretty fish, they then get old and die, and you buy more. and for me, there is a disconnect here: you love your pets, but you are a consumer of pets, and if you dont take care to limit yourself to locally bred ones, you even end up putting pressure on the wild population.

so, no matter what species it is, breeding is a way to reduce your footprint to zero. you give more animals back into the market than you take from the market. its not that important for cats and dogs, because all of them are bred in captivity, and buying them wont put any pressure on wolves or servals or other wild cats.

but in reptiles and exotic fish, there still is plenty of wild-caught and poached animals on the market. now you are able to keep these animals without putting pressure on wild populations only because there are breeders that produce them in captivity. and if you breed, you enable others to do the same. also, if ball pythons, corn snakes, texas rat snakes, boa constrictors, western hognose, and reticulated pythons are all rather cheap and all available in a multitude of cool pattern and color variations, it will make rare wild-caught snakes much harder to sell. so even if the number of species that are bred is limited, all species of snakes benefit to a degree.

i dont think im the only one, Brian from BHB said something similar in an interview. one reason why he breeds is to provide consumers with alternatives, and to put pressure on the market in order to keep wild reptiles safe from poaching. yes he really said that, he wants to put pressure on the market and lower the market prices for quality captive-bred animals.


and then, of course, its fun to help create something beautiful, and then there are the awesome morphs that can be combined and refined by breeding.


if you can make money with it, even better. but there are enough reasons to do it as a hobby as well.